Sublime

James Jones, who was living in Illinois and inching ahead with From Here to Eternity.

Humboldt died on May 6, 1859. He was in his ninetieth year and still at work, on the final volume of Cosmos. He had never returned to Spanish America, unlike Bonpland, who, after serving for a time as the head of the Empress Josephine’s gardens, left Paris for South America, where he finished out his days. But for all the years that had passed, for

Geographical curiosity and his abiding love for wilderness travel seem to have been the main reasons for these journeys, but he usually managed to find some practical, economic rationale: a railroad survey, a party of miners that wanted to be guided to some remote mountain range, a potential livestock market that called for investigation. In 1858 h

Rather let it be named from the fishes that swim in it, the wild fowl or quadrupeds which frequent it, the wild flowers which grow by its shores, or some wild man or child the thread of whose history is interwoven with its own; not from him who could show no title to it but the deed which a like-minded neighbor or legislature gave him—him who thoug

On September 12, 2013, I reported Avomeen’s results in an article titled “How Chris McCandless Died,” which was published on The New Yorker website.

Like many a wandering male, before and after him, he was dealing with his emotional pain by trying to outdistance it geographically. For the rest of his life he avoided the central Rockies